Peter Pilgrim :: Java Champion :: Enterprise Blog

Tuesday, 26th February, 2013, the day one of the Round-Up. The shenanigans of United were left behind. Today was a fresh start, a time that duly manipulated into a recharge. I was exhausted, the others had gone ahead to Rumours for initial Round-Up coffee, then they walked a short distance to the Parish Hall.

The Parish Hall

Whilst I was tucking in a scrambled egg breakfast, Bruce and the JavaPosse organised conference badges, explained what an Open Space was to new beginners, and everyone did a meet and greet again. By the time I arrived with my coffee, the room was a hive of activity, as participants took up post-notes and pinned proposed session titles to the wall. Open Space is a contributory activity; there is no achievement if you refuse to get involved. I proposed a Gradle session for Wednesday, which tied up with some else, who wanted a session of Build Pipelines; so those topics could be grouped together as a session.

An example of the self-organisation of an open-space conference like the JavaPosse Round-Up. The participants come up with session ideas for the morning and also afternoon activities.
The church group were having meeting at 9:00, hence the hall was unavailable on this morning.

Because of the introductions and self-organisation of the participants, the first session took place at 10:00am and the second session followed at 11:30am. The sessions lasted one hour at the maximum and there is break between them. The first session of the round-up that I choose was Reactive Programming, which I think was proposed by James Ward. It was good discussion of asynchronous and non-blocking input and output operations of applications. We talked a lot about Scala in this session and some frameworks like Play, and comparisons to NodeJS. Many people expressed their view on this style of programming. The second session was hosted by Barry Hawkins and it was about Domain Driven Design and whether this subject has been usurped, diluted and vandalised by over zealous practitioners, and perhaps misunderstood by the developer community in the same way that Agile with a big-A is accepted by good practice, but poorly implemented by many organisations. I must admit prior to this one, I had no experience of Domain-Driven Design. I took part in it as this subject always appears at technical and agile conferences. I came away with tentative, yes, that maybe I should invest some time in the future to learn about Ubiquitous Language and Bounded Contexts. I believe I was put off from the subject, because of the perceived notion that DDD is strongly associated with Model Driven Architecture and meta language programming, which I absolutely have no such interest. Although, I have an interest in Domain Specific Languages, of course, such as ScalaFX, I have not yet come across a project where I need to be build a DSL to model a software design for client. I believe this podcast will be well worth a listen. After the morning session, I went back to the house and collected my snowboard.

There was no chance of slacking off today.

Picture of me with a helmet camera, GoPro Hero 3 Silver

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I have been going through my photographs from my October 2011 California trip. It is time to share and poke life. (See below for Dennis Ritchie)

Here’s a guy that revolutionised the computer industry, the music industry, the motion picture industry, the telephone industry. There’s four, and maybe more. That’s impact.

Robert Cringely

“When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is [just] the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life. Have fun, and save a little money.”

“That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is, everything around that you call life, was made up by people who were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that you will never be the same again.”

“The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually …you can push it in, something will pop out [on] the other side. You change [it], you can mould it. That’s maybe the most important thing.”

Steve Jobs, 1994

He’s going to inspire a whole new generation.

Will.i.am, The Black Eye Peas

San Francisco Apple Store: “Hey Steve. See you around ok? Hopefully not soon. Thanks”. As Steve Jobs himself stated in the Reed College address that even people who want to go heaven, don’t want to die to get there.

Emotions run high at the Apple Store, San Francisco. People do care and empathise with former CEO and Chairman of Apple.

Memorials for Steve Jobs at Apple’s San Francisco store on Thursday 6th October 2011, the last day of JavaOne conference.

I wrote two and drew my post-it notes as a personal tribute. I did it in the evening on the way to dinner and walking back to Villa Florence Hotel.

Poignant tributes that existed until 7th October 2011, until a violent hooligan lost the plot, and vandalised the people’s memorial. [The vandal voiced his ire, "What did f**king Steve Jobs ever do for me? I am f***ing poor and an American. This f**king computers are expensive! I can’t afford them! F*** Steve Jobs!"]

A lone candle burns on the street corner in SF

Tasteless or tact? I was reminded of our own Princess Diana’s sudden death in 1997. The irony was this similar brood affair was taking place in California, whilst I was attending, and speaking at a JavaOne conference. It was not lost on us, that we human do care enough, and we were sorry for Steve Jobs passing. I think this is what the focus on user experience and putting the user first can ultimately give you.

The British have a Royal family, so it was peculiar to see such an emotional event taking place in America. What is fascinating is that the respect and the time all of the onlookers took I to write their post-it notes. Where as the former HRH and Princess of Wales had lots of beautiful and oftentimes deep sentimental floral tributes strewn outside Buckingham Palace, much of it sadden a national by such unexpected loss. This time it was the tech aficionados of the entire world made the Apple Store’s nearest to them as places of homage and peace. Many of post-it notes were written by tourists, travellers, and conference attendees, in foreign languages in San Francisco and everyday fans of one or the other Apple consumer products, and the murals were all eloquent. I also never expected Steve Jobs to pass so suddenly, I too thought that he had a lot more time than he had. I for one will always remember this significant JavaOne conference and my time in America.

Overall, October was a sad time also for the passing of Dennis Ritchie, who co-created the programming language C and helped build the foundation of the modern day UNIX operating system. If Steve Jobs was uber important, then Dennis was a mega important. Without his insight in to turning out a easier programming language than, the then, assembly code, then we would still standing still in the dark ages of computers software engineering practice and methodology. Dennis Ritchie foresight was all of our gain. The turning of the tide. It was his creation of C the programming language that influenced Java the programming language and, of course, Objective C the lingua franca of Apple’s iOS native platform, through its popularisation under Steve Job’s NeXT operating system NeXSTSTEP. Other strands of that tree of C inspired Bjarne Stroustrup effort with C++ ( C with classes) and thus ushered in the field of Object Oriented Programming to the mainstream.

Both Steve Paul Jobs and Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie will be missed.

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Here is screencast of a web presentation.

It is called The Fundamental Business Case for Scala. I admit this was long overdue by three weeks or so. JavaPosse RoundUp and a new Bathroom installation were in my way and therefore my time was severly crunched. 

This talk is aimed at non-technical staff in the organisation, non-programmers and business oriented people, line managers, team management, and of course the dearest stakeholders. I attempt to fly and pull up to 30000ft above the clouds, so that you ,the business decision maker, are not overloaded with technical programmer jargon. The only things you need to know, you will already know, are: Java the software platform, object-oriented programming and a dose of common sense. The talk is about getting Scala adopted into your organisation through the act of necessity. Change is inevitable and it is happening all around the Java software platform and it includes the wider community ecosystem. Change is uncertainty, what are specific factors that influencing the trend towards Beyond Java? In this presentation I attempted to answer this question.

The Fundamental Business Case for Scala from Peter Pilgrim on Vimeo.

Please do let me know if you have feedback, without it I cannot hope to improve this talk. I really do need to make this a living talk, organic, your ideas and suggestions are valuable. Send me an email or tweet please.

Thank you in advance

(Sitting in the Westminister room at the QCon London 2011, Westminister, London)Tweet

boundaries exists

Some boundaries are meant to be overcome. For example in the domain of software development and construction we look to bridging the interface between components, especially in architecture. The culture bounds of the software created lie in the boundaries of those who create it.

Artificial boundaries enforced by organisations

The first type of boundaries are those dictate by an organisation or working within one:

Divided in two subtypes naturally:

Company

• non-disclosure, confidentiality, intellectual property
• know your customer for client facing roles, “onboarding”, external communications
• corporate rules, regulatory requirements, compliances, company policy

Culture
• gossiping, acting like  a sycophant
• the rumour treadmill
• office politik
• value of communication, interpersonal relationships

Personal Bounds and Limiting Beliefs

The second type of boundaries are those affecting your professional career path.

• Your values: confidence in programming Java, or writing decent HTML / designing web pages
• Your beliefs: build on success of the past, the ideas you know in the current time. right here, righty now
• Your inspiration: your belief, depends on whether you are follower or leader
• Your contribution how big or how ever small affects to the ecosystem, the more you involve you are in a community or wider group, and the more investment you put in emotionally, the more you get out.

Limiting Belief is Inversely Proportional to Personal Contribution

Your personal contribution, therefore is a direct call-to-action, and thus you can begin pushing up against the real and artificial boundaries. The more you push, the more freedom you should expect to obtain.

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I, hereby, declare that these statements below are, now, my own personal “corporate” values:

• In any new organisation that I work with or be involved with, I will work inside a team of people that heavily influence the engineering, the broad scope and design quality of the products.
• Any new organisation,which could quite be possibly in the financial services sector, must be able to demonstrate proactive changes to technology change including tangible innovation, that is not only invested in Java, the technology, the platform and language, but is also looking to move Beyond Java as a programming language.
• As a certified SCRUM master (circa May 2010) the only organisations that I will even consider, from now, are those which are working with a well known Agile methodology (such as Iterative Driven Development, SCRUM, Lean/Kanban,etc) or moving towards it in the extreme short-term.
• I realise that we are all in an era where people skills are of paramount importance. To that end, I want to improve my business domain knowledge. Being part of a solid development team, I would like to listen and learn too; and be educated by other talented team members.
• In any new organisation that I might consider, now or in the not too distant future, they shall be moving to or actually already practising sustainable software architecture.

Peter Pilgrim

Wednesday 15^th December 2010

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